


Because it snows, because it burns

by Dissenter



Series: Cry havoc [10]
Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Flame Lore (Katekyou Hitman Reborn!), Historical, Implied/Referenced Torture, Nazis, Period-Typical Sexism, Snowed In, Unconventional Uses for Dying Will Flames, World War II, wartime Vongola
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 03:49:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,855
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20251693
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dissenter/pseuds/Dissenter
Summary: The line between what needs to be done and the right thing to do can be a hard one to walk.





	Because it snows, because it burns

**Author's Note:**

> Daniela, Tiberia, Aurelia, and Ferrucio, snowed in with baby Cloud Skull, and a prisoner.   
I meant to give Ferrucio and Aurelia more screentime in this fic, but Skull ended up stealing the story like the massive diva he is.

It was a very good thing they were all Flame active, because there was no fuel in the abandoned mountain shack they had taken shelter in, and the night was bitterly cold. The prisoner was pinned down tight between the matched bookends that Aurelia and Ferrucio made. It was very obvious, in moments like this that those two were close kin, cousins, or “cousins”, she never had asked which, but their faces were alike enough to make her wonder.

They held the prisoner just a little closer than was ideal for restraint, raised their own temperatures a little higher than they might have otherwise, to try and keep him warm. They needed him alive and coherent, and hypothermia was conducive to neither of those things. He didn’t look especially comforted by the consideration.

The child was curled up on Daniela’s lap, warmed by her Flames, although his body temperature alone marked him as right on the edge of going active, and he’d probably be fine on his own. Tiberia was pacing, part restless irritation, part calculated measure to raise the ambient temperature within the room, and the snow piling up around the walls might be its own problem but at least it provided a measure of insulation.

It had been a very long day.

Bad luck, more than anything else had caused the mission to go bad, a few people in places they weren’t expected to be at inconvenient times, had left them to flee in a hurry with a high ranked prisoner in tow. Ferrucio had been able to provide enough of a distraction for them to make a break for the mountains, but in the process had somehow managed to pick up a small tagalong. None of them were quite sure where he came from, or what he’d been doing before he decided to follow Ferrucio around like a lost puppy, although ragged clothes and thin wrists spoke a language all their own.

The only name they’d been able to get out of him was Skull, the lie told with such bold faced and unrepentant insincerity Aurelia had all but collapsed with the mad cackling of a Mist that had spotted a fellow troublemaker. Any attempts to find out further details had been foiled by the kid’s amazing ability to babble non-stop for hours without revealing any useful information at all. It was actually pretty impressive. Daniela and Tiberia had both been given years of mafia princess etiquette training to develop exactly that skill, and yet this kid put them both to shame on pure natural talent. Daniela kind of wanted to keep him.

At least the reason he’d been following Ferrucio was painfully self-evident. A baby Cloud, right on the edge of going active, it had probably been pure instinct to latch on to the first vaguely welcoming adult Cloud he saw, especially if he’d had nowhere else to go. Baby flame users were after all drawn to their adult counterparts, sometimes it was very convenient, other times it was an absolute disaster. The jury was still out on this particular incident, cute as the brat was.

Having a child present made certain things… difficult. The glaring problem of course being the prisoner. Daniela had done a lot of terrible things in the course of this war, but she wasn’t quite prepared for extracting information in front of a six year old. Not that the bastard didn’t have it coming, and not that there weren’t perfectly good reasons beyond personal satisfaction driving them to take such steps. But there was a line, she felt, and as a general principle, exposing small children to that sort of thing definitely crossed it.

The shack had one room and no privacy, they couldn’t even use Aurelia’s Mist to make sure the kid didn’t see anything, as close to active as Skull was she doubted it would hold for long, and Clouds tended to react badly to being caught in Mist illusions. So they were reduced to whispering incredibly vaguely worded threats in the prisoner’s ear whenever one of them managed to distract the brat, and hoping the scum didn’t figure out how unwilling they were to follow through in the presence of a child.

It was more than a little embarrassing from a professional standpoint. Luckily the fascist bastard was more highly strung than intelligent. Actually, leaving his own imagination to do most of the work seemed to be working much better than she’d anticipated. Guilty conscience maybe, or just thoughts of what he himself had done to his own prisoners when he had been in the place they stood now. An interesting note for future efforts, if the prisoner was suitably imaginative, a little subtle menace actually went a long way.

They hadn’t even laid a finger on him when he cracked like an egg, cracked like a man who knew exactly what horrors could be inflicted on the human body if questions were not answered quickly. Which on the one hand was a good thing, they’d needed that information badly. The locations of captured resistance prisoners, both mafia, and reds, the names of officers in charge, the security measures in place, everything they needed to get their people _back. _And it didn’t matter if they were her own, or just temporary allies, the thought of leaving any of them to the kind of things the fascists did to those in their power made her want to Rage. Aurelia didn’t have the raw power to teleport, wasn’t one of the mere handful of Mist’s with that ability, but with Ferrucio there to propagate her Flames she was more than capable of getting a message out, the extra hours they gained by getting him to talk so soon _mattered. _It didn’t matter how long she and Tiberia and the others were trapped up in the mountains, she had full confidence in Beltrano’s ability to act on the information provided.

It was a good thing he’d broken so easily, that they hadn’t had to make a choice between a child’s innocence and the lives of their own. But now they were faced with another issue. The prisoner was of no further use, which meant the question of what to do with him now, had to be raised.

He would of course have to be disposed of, that went without saying. He knew too much, had seen Daniela and Tiberia’s _faces, _knew the power they held, knew enough to _fear _them and being underestimated was too valuable an advantage. He couldn’t be let loose again, not now that he knew, and the Vongola hadn’t had the resources to hold prisoners since she’d burned the Iron fort. The Bovino would hold prisoners if she asked, but their resources were not infinite, and they couldn’t afford to waste them, not on a prisoner with no further value. He had to die, she knew it, he knew it, everyone in the room knew it. Everyone that is except for one very small Cloud.

He would have to be disposed of, but again they were faced with the dilemma of how to do it without the kid realising what was going on. Personally Daniela favoured waiting until the snow cleared enough for them to take their “guest” on a walk in the woods. Out of sight out of mind after all. But of course there were risks to that approach, not least of which was the danger that the prisoner might try and endear himself to the kid in hopes of saving his own skin somehow.

Tiberia looked at her sidelong, and they didn’t need words for Daniela to know that she thought they should just cover the kid’s eyes and do it quickly, and hope he got over it, rather than risk the prisoner trying to charm him into helping an escape attempt. After all, it would all be infinitely more traumatic if the kid somehow got attached to the scum.

Ty always did prefer approaching an issue head on. Ferrucio would probably agree, he was also the straightforward sort. Aurelia could go either way, Mists were hard to predict, but in the end, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t a democracy, and the decision was Daniela’s to make. She looked over at the shaking form of their prisoner, shaking with the cold of the snow piling up outside the door of their flimsy shelter, shaking with fear, for the death he knew was breathing down his neck, shaking with rage and burning shame, that he could be brought so low by those he saw as lesser than himself, by women, by criminals, by the outcast and the outsiders.

It happened very suddenly. Rage, and fear, and shame, and desperation snapped something in him, and before Daniela’s intuition could even spark a warning a wave of Sun Flames blazed out of him all unexpected.

Surprise more than anything else let him knock Ferrucio and Aurelia aside, he had shown no hint earlier that he was close to going active. It had been sloppy of them, all of them, to have let their guard down. Just because he had nowhere to go didn’t mean he wouldn’t try to escape anyway, and Daniela had been so focused on the problem of the nearly active child on her lap that she had missed the nudge of her Sky born intuition that would have given her advance warning.

He at least didn’t appear to be an especially powerful Sun, but desperation gave him inhuman strength as he made a break for the door, activating every scrap of muscle and bone and energy in one last desperate bid for survival.

Tiberia caught him halfway to the exit. Daniela barely had the presence of mind to throw a hand wreathed in Rain blue over the kid’s eyes before Wrath flames consumed the man. It wasn’t a pretty death. The best that could be said of it was that it was quick. She thought she’d knocked Skull out hard and fast enough that he hadn’t seen it, but it wouldn’t hold long, not with the sheer power of his newly activated Cloud Flames. Luckily, Tiberia hadn’t left much in the way of remains. Aurelia had brushed the ashes into the corner, and by the time the kid woke it was like the prisoner had never been there at all.

Skull played along like a pro. Daniela didn’t doubt he had a pretty good idea of what happened. He wasn’t stupid, and if he had been on his own before they picked him up, he probably had a pretty good idea about the things he didn’t want to know. He chattered, and sat in her lap, and didn’t once glance over at the scorch mark Tiberia had left on the floor, and never once asked where the prisoner went. Daniela was impressed all over again. Years of mafia wife finishing school hadn’t been able to teach her that level of calculated, deliberate obliviousness.

Maybe she should send him to stay with the Bovino. She suspected that Fiorella would have much to teach a child with that much natural talent.

**Author's Note:**

> So yeah, Ferrucio may or may not be Aurelia's bastard half sibling, officially he's her cousin though. Aurelia is the Superbi Donna, and is about halfway to bonding with Tiberia.   
This ended up a bit darker than I planned, but then, its a story about superpowered mafioso set during WW2 under Nazi control, dark kind of comes naturally.  
And yeah, Tiberia just straight up murdered a guy. Don't worry, he was a very bad guy.


End file.
